Maison Margiela / Spring 2013 RTW

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If the truth be told, there is something absolutely fascinating about how Maison Martin Margiela continues to thrive against all the odds. You wouldn’t have bet a cloven-hoof bootie that this would be the house that would survive without its enigmatic namesake designer, even if he was publicly invisible, in a very visible way. Yet here’s the thing—it does, and how. Maison Martin Margiela has flourished, reigniting the interest in everything that the innovative Belgian stood for the strongest since he himself left the building. It helps, of course, that the house showed a stellar artisanal collection during July’s haute couture, which brilliantly captured the wit and imagination of Margiela of old. And now there is this coming spring’s considered and chic way with the manipulation of planes and volumes of fabric, treated in the most minimalistic of ways. There was an airy inflating of looks to create a new sense of elegance (a swoon-worthy black satin tee over a diaphonous black gazar ball skirt) or cutting them close to the body, adding a restrained and taut notion of sexiness (witness the many gray dresses and skirts that posited the idea of the new longer line that finishes around the lower calf). Both silhouettes were the result of the house’s once arresting forays into cartoon-like oversizing and constraint taken to fetish-like levels.

Perhaps that’s why Maison Martin Margiela can hold its head high. Its current anonymous team-driven approach has identified, and then stayed true to the codes of the house that he set over two decades. It’s a classicist’s portrayal of Margiela, to be sure, but one that feels authentic and genuine, and which has of late produced great-looking and thoroughly wearable clothes. This, of course, has become the central thread of next spring after so many seasons of so many designers giving us things that were stylized, theatrical, and—oh go on, then, I’ll say it—impossible to be seen in unless you were one of those types courting the cameras outside the shows. It made fashion an epic and thrilling spectacle, but rather left behind the majority (i.e., everyone, basically) who simply wanted something new and exciting to wear. You’ll find quite a lot here in Maison Martin Margiela’s spring that would make a difference to your closet in meaningful ways, starting with the many wonderful pants, tailored wide and flat or soft and fluid, and lengthening the legs in miraculous ways. Then there were a couple of effortlessly chic pieces to wear over them, namely a long black coat with cap sleeves and a shorter alternative in gray, both scissored at the front to let them curve open. (Actually, more of these variations on the jacket would have been fantastic.) But it was those trousers as they morphed into the evening looks that emerged as the stars, turning into strapless jumpsuits, as a partner to a trouser leg turned into a bustier, or as a means to wear a flowing, sheer floor-length dress—a look that’s practical, elegant, and a little twisted. In other words, totally Margiela.